Reagan grabbed life -- all of it

Since Saturday, people have stood in line to pay tribute to Ronald Reagan.

“He was a hero to me,” said California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He had the “ability to inspire the nation to live up to its high ideals,” said Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Reagan “restored a nation and saved a world,” said President George Bush.

Their words paint a picture of a man more mythic than real. In lots of ways they’re right. Reagan’s decisive actions and his use of elevated language to voice his vision for his nation and world inspire others to speak of him in noble terms.

From John Winthrop, first Massachusetts Bay Colony governor, Reagan borrowed the phrase “shining city on a hill” to embody America’s promise of freedom and prosperity. His fondness for light imagery emerged in his 1984 campaign slogan: “It’s always morning in America.” His last words to the American people recall the image from old Westerns, the one of the cowboy riding off into the sunset and into a new beginning. He wrote, “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”

When the Challenger exploded, killing all on board, his poetic speech comforted a nation. Invoking a skill that he had perfected in his days as a radio sportscaster, when listeners depended on his description of events to convey the action and atmosphere on the playing field, he described the last time we saw the astronauts. They “waved goodbye,” he said, “and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.” His words showed me that goodness and hope were not lost. Rather, I pictured those who died being released into a better world -- one where the sunset leads into dawn, his favorite image.

Then there are those who recall a man more human than mythic. He was “the most human president we have ever had,” “a great storyteller,” and “a man of humor,” they say. Reagan may have chosen those descriptions himself. He said he could tell a lot about a man from the way he ate jellybeans: whether he picked out all of one color or grabbed a handful. Reagan picked a handful. Generous accolades go to those who have lived life to the fullest, who have eaten jellybeans indiscriminately. The human merges with the mythic here.

When I taught “Ulysses,” a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, I saw shades of the Greek hero in the contemporary man and vice versa. Both men were aged and determined; both had a vision of a better world; and both were human.

Ulysses had to plug his ears with wax to protect himself from the lure of the Sirens’ song. He was so likable that even his dog wagged his tail feebly in recognition of the man whom he had not seen in 20 years. And his loyal wife always believed that he would come home to her one day.

Aging Ulysses tasted all the jellybeans. “I will drink life to the lees,” he said. “How dull it is ... To rest unburnished, not to shine in use.”

Rust didn’t settle on Reagan, either. He was a son, husband, father; a sportscaster, TV and film star; a cowboy, rancher, orator and storyteller; a guild president, governor, and U.S. president. He was also a visionary who persuaded us to adopt his view of the world. Ulysses had this same gift, which he used to inspire the aging mariners to forsake their rocking chairs and sail again with him because “Some work of noble note, may yet be done ... ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”

You can hear the echo of those words in Reagan’s challenge: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”--the Berlin wall, symbol of the division between the free and the oppressed in the Communist world of Europe.

In October 1989, the wall was beginning to crumble. My husband was in Czechoslovakia when that country opened its borders to the East Germans. The world watched as they clogged the roads leading out of the Communist half of Germany and into a new life.

From a phone in Prague, Frank described what he saw, “People are dancing and singing in the streets. Men, women, and children are parading up and down celebrating. There’s no room for cars to move.” But there was room for abandoned ones. “The East Germans have abandoned them in the streets and at the border,” he said. The reason: they wanted out of their country where they had been imprisoned. They were seeking asylum in another country, a country that had seen its own bloody uprising in 1968 squelched by the Communists. Two peoples celebrated that October day.

Democratic revolution swept through Europe. Much credit went to the man who ate all the jellybeans, who persevered in his vision of a free world, who could have said the lines that Tennyson gave to Ulysses: That he was determined to “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

I saw Reagan once. It was at a dinner at the Bluefield Armory where he came to speak in the late 1970s when he was exploring running for the Republican presidential nomination. I went for two reasons: His picture had hung on a wall at our home when I was growing up, put there by my mom because “He looks like your dad,” she said; and because I knew in my bones he was going to become a president. It was worth the $50 that Frank and I paid to sit at a makeshift table on the upstairs bleacher deck and peer through the guardrail at him.

I remember the loud applause when he mentioned running for the nomination. This applause came from an area where confessing to be a Republican is a politician’s kiss of death. The other image I have is of his broad shoulders, which you have to have if you are a mythic hero. They have to support the world’s burdens.

It also helps if you prefer to grab your jellybeans by the handful.